Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

by William Kennedy

  “I don’t have sides in this revolution,” Alfie said, “but that puke of a man, I could empty a pistol into his face right here. Last Christmas Eve everybody in Cuba is with the family, right? Noche Buena. And he arrests twenty-five men, one with seven kids, Twenty-sixth of July people mostly. A union leader, one from Prío’s party, young guys, couple of commies. The soldiers are friendly, just come with us for a few questions, and they take them out of the houses and on the road they break their ribs, strangle them, hang them, shoot them, dump them. Two sons of my cousin Arsenio, an old outlaw who helped Fidel from the beginning, the army wouldn’t tell him anything. Then a taxi driver tells him they found two bodies. They’d cut half the face off one of his sons. The other son they machine-gunned his crotch. Somebody heard a lieutenant say, ‘He won’t fuck anymore.’ I’m looking for that lieutenant.”

  Noche Buena stopped revolutionary activity in Holguín for weeks, and overnight Quesada was the army’s exemplar of Cuban peace through death. The army promoted him to colonel, Batista gave him a dinner at the Palace, and suddenly he was a candidate to lead the battle against Fidel in the Sierra. Now here he is playing roulette with the commander of Cuban intelligence.

  Quinn saw Inez coming along the aisle toward them, in heels and a dark blue dress, her hair in a tight coif, a new image, not glamorous, but smart and sleek, befitting a casino hostess. She smiled at them all and said through her teeth, “Get out of the club now. Right now. Something is happening. Go. Go.”

  And so the three stood and walked casually out of the nightclub and Quinn pressed the elevator button in the foyer where two men in suits and neckties, one of them Javier from the garage, were playing slot machines. Javier saw them and turned his back, dropped a coin into the slot, and pulled the handle. As the elevator door opened, the slot machine rang its bell and delivered a rattle of coins which Javier made no move to retrieve. He popped another coin. Then the elevator door closed on the trio.

  Did five minutes pass? Ten?

  They were in the Buick when Colonel Quesada and Lieutenant Colonel López from the SIM, with his aide Captain Godoy, and their three wives, the men in civilian clothes, the wives in dinner gowns, entered the foyer from the casino. As the captain summoned the elevator, Javier and his comrade took machine pistols from under their suit coats and shot Quesada first, then López, also hitting both women who, in terrorized flight, collided with their own mirror images and slumped. One bullet grazed the necktie of the captain, who snatched the pistol from López’s shoulder holster and fired at the shooters. But by then they were out of sight, on the run toward the casino’s rear exit onto Calle 25.

  When they reached the Nacional Alfie called Inez to find out what Javier and his comrade had wrought. It was chaos: López and the women wounded, Colonel Quesada executed with such extreme suddenness that he did not yet know he was dead.

  At the hotel bar Alfie toasted Javier with daiquiris and Renata recapitulated the killing—carried out by Javier of the 26th but with guns from the Directorio—a refreshed alliance of the groups that had been working for the same cause, warily independent of each other. If the Directorio had killed Batista, Fidel would now be irrelevant. At the garage Aurelio had said the guns he was buying would go mostly to Fidel, a gift from the Directorio in exile. Renata had asked him then, “What of all the guns Diego and I put in the Sixteenth Street apartment?”

  “Still there, but we have nobody to get them.”

  Renata remembered how Alfie’s mouth had tightened with functional hatred when he said he would shoot Quesada in the face. Alfie was a crazy one, and he might help us bring out the guns. She would find money somewhere to pay him. She would give the guns to Fidel as another gift. Yes, Alfie would do this and Quinn would help. They would all talk about it. There was a bond among the three of them. Quinn did not seem afraid. They left the hotel and she watched him as he drove, memorizing his face.

  “You must find a place to stop, out of the light,” she said.

  “Are you all right? Are you ill?”

  “No, just stop.”

  Quinn parked on a dark street and looked at her staring at him. She leaned toward him.

  “Love me, Quinn,” she said.

  “I will,” he said, “I do.”

  Then, with their first touch of love since they’d met, he embraced and kissed her, and she crawled inside him.

  “Love me,” she said.

  “I will. I will love you. I love, I love Renata.”

  “Love me, lléname, fill me.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I can do that.”

  Struck by the brilliant light of the enabling moon, Quinn spiraled everything he knew about love into the center of this divine woman. At this sudden onset of joy he heard Narciso chanting:“The dead surround him and claim him as their own.

  He wears the dead like the beads of Changó.”

  Quinn received the music and his pulse skipped a syncopated beat.

  At Quinn’s apartment they stopped making love at three in the morning, not because they were finished, they were only beginning; but it came to Quinn that if Renata really did want to go home for her own Changó beads and to see her parents, this was the time. Checking out the home of a museum guide who knew a dead rebel would be low priority on the night the police and the army were out in major numbers tracking the two killers of Fermín Quesada. Renata said Quinn’s suggestion was perfect and they would not even have to park near her house. They could park on the next street and keep hidden by tall bougainvillea the whole length of her garden, and go in through the French doors to the house.

  From the bougainvillea they saw no one, only the light in Renata’s kitchen, and just before four o’clock they entered her home like burglars. She took Quinn to the living room and he sat alone with the light from a street lamp glinting on the crystal chandelier, the huge silver punch bowl, and large silver-framed photos he could barely see but presumed were her parents. As he gained power over the darkness he saw a painting that demanded his gaze—a full-length albino figure, faceless except for cutout eyes, embracing a black figure with a hidden face, the albino holding a fish that was grinning like a devil. The figures were overlain with strands of seaweed, and the image haunted Quinn. He remembered a similar painting in the Bellas Artes, obviously by the same artist, illuminating the grisly myth of Sikan, who was beheaded for revealing the secret of the god Tanze; and in days to come Renata would tell him the grislier tale of the painter herself, dead of suicide.

  Renata had gone quietly upstairs to her mother’s bed, knelt beside it and whispered “Mami,” then shushed her mother and held her arm so she would not move it and wake her sleeping husband. She backed away, beckoning her mother, and they retreated to Renata’s room where she delivered a capsule history of two days of death, terror, and fear of the police who wanted to interrogate her as the friend of a Palace attacker. I knew him only through his painting, Mamita, it is such a tragedy. I am all right, as you can see and I have Esme’s car and I have a friend downstairs, an americano who helped me, and we’re going to Cárdenas to stay with Tía Gabriela, but you must tell no one where I am or they will come and arrest me. I need clothes and money, Mamita, and don’t tell Papa or he will be furious and think I’m in politics. But the politics are not mine; they belong to an artist I knew who is dead.

  While her mother went to get money Renata pulled from under her bed the large cardboard box where she kept valuables and letters. She took out the red and white Changó beads and put them around her neck. She uncovered the three pistols she kept in the box, put two back and kept the Colt Cobra .38, which she wrapped in her underwear and put in the suitcase along with blouses, skirts, makeup, hairbrush, toiletries, and the bottle of perfume, Gardenia, that Alejo Carpentier gave her.

  Her mother sat on the bed by the suitcase and handed Renata six hundred dollars in cash, all she had in the house. Renata said that’s wonderful, tell Papa I love him and I will call, or maybe someone else will call and say the clock i
s fixed, which will mean I am all right.

  “Natita,” said her mother, “you are a problem child and you do not tell the truth. I won’t ask what this is about for it will kill me if it is what I think it is, and kill your father before it kills me. You have a second life. One life is not enough for you. You are the strangest child and I love you for that, but be careful with your precious life and do not be crazy. Now take me down to meet your American. Is he Catholic? Does he have money?”

  Quinn instantly recognized Renata in her mother’s beauty, obviously a genetic gift to this family. Even in her tightly clutched silk robe she had the elegant, lustrous look of a silent movie vamp—Dolores del Rio came to mind.

  “My mother, Celia,” Renata said. “Mama, this is Daniel.”

  Quinn took Celia’s fingers in his hand and kissed them and said he was incredibly happy to meet the mother of Renata, whom he valued beyond words and whom he wanted to marry as soon as possible.

  “Marry?” said Celia.

  “The first time he saw me he told Hemingway he would marry me,” Renata said.

  “Hemingway? What does he have to do with you?”

  “It is a long story, no, a short story, Mamita, but I have grown fond of Daniel very quickly. He is from New York.”

  “And that makes everything all right?”

  “I knew you would like him.”

  “I don’t even know his full name.”

  “Quinn,” said Quinn. “Daniel Quinn. And I really believe it’s fated that I’m in Cuba and fated that I met Renata. I’m tracking my grandfather who came here in the last century to write a book about your national hero Céspedes. I read that book in high school and dreamed of coming to a place like Cuba and writing about battles and heroes and villains in a war like your Ten Years War. Now there’s a war in the streets of Havana, and in the mountains of Oriente, and I’m here and I’ve started writing about it.”

  “Why do you want to write about war?”

  “To tell something to myself, and to keep myself from boredom.”

  “Do not get my daughter into this.”

  “It’s the last thing on my mind. I want to save her from everything.”

  “You are impetuous, asking to marry her so soon.”

  “It’s the sanest judgment I’ve ever made.”

  “Daniel is a new friend but a great friend,” Renata said, taking Quinn’s hand. “I don’t know how it happened so fast but it is very real.”

  “All her life she was an incredibly loving child,” Celia said. “Everyone loves her.”

  “I’m finding that out,” said Quinn.

  “We have to go,” Renata said. “The police may return.”

  “I’m sorry to leave,” Quinn said. “I wanted to talk about your dancing. Renata said you won prizes.”

  “You want to talk about my dancing?”

  “My father won prizes for his dancing. He was a prize waltzer. You were too, no?”

  “I was.”

  “You see? Another stroke of fate—Renata and I, children of prize waltzers.”

  “You are as strange as my daughter. Another time we will talk about dancing. Protect this child of mine.”

  “With my life,” said Quinn.

  He remembered that his grandfather wrote about Céspedes’ child—his son Oscar. The Spaniards captured Oscar in battle and threatened to kill him if Céspedes and his followers did not surrender. Céspedes told the Spaniards Oscar was not his only son, that he was the father of all Cubans who died for their country. A firing squad then executed his son.

  They went to the Ali Bar, where Renata called her contact number and spoke with a voice she recognized, and said have Pedrito call me here. They drank mojitos because she always drank them here for breakfast after all-nighters.

  “Beny Moré sang to me here one night,” she said. “He comes all the time. Everybody comes here. Gary Cooper sat right there.”

  “Do you see anyone who knows you?” Quinn asked.

  “Nobody would know me with my blond wig.”

  “I’d recognize your mouth no matter what color hair you had.”

  They drank their mojitos and in twenty minutes Aurelio called. Renata told him Alfie could bring out las cosas from the Vedado apartment because he is shrewd and fearless and she trusts him and will pay him herself to do it. Aurelio said he’d call Alfie.

  “I will go see Alfie now,” she said, “but you must do the rest because I’m going to Santiago.”

  It was dawn when they left the Ali Bar and Quinn considered calling Hemingway about the Cooney challenge. He would be up and writing. He gets up with the birds. But does he answer the phone during birdsong? So they woke up Alfie and he met them on the Nacional’s patio, which was empty of people. They walked down the garden path and stood under a royal palm with their backs to the hotel and Renata told him of the guns. He said he’d think about it after he talked to Pedrito, who, she admitted, was really Aurelio. But if the police were watching that apartment it would be dangerous.

  “I will give you five hundred dollars now and another five hundred when I get back from Santiago. Is that enough? We are not buying these weapons, just reclaiming them,” she said.

  “These are Directorio guns?”

  “Yes, but they will go to Fidel now.”

  “Is this Fidel’s money?”

  “No, it is mine.”

  “You’re the new Directorio, all by yourself?”

  “I worry the police will take the guns I put there. Fidel needs them badly.”

  “How will you get them to Fidel?”

  “Maybe by yacht, or truck, maybe airplane. A car is impossible, there are too many guns. Aurelio will figure a way. Maybe you can help him. I won’t be here.” She handed him five of the six hundred dollars her mother had given her.

  “Keep your money,” he said. “Wait till I get the guns.”

  “You don’t behave like a gangster. Gangsters like money.”

  “You don’t behave like a debutante. Debutantes don’t know anything about money.”

  “Fidel will be pleased if you get him these guns.”

  “I think I knew that.”

  “We’ll be staying at the Casa Granda hotel in Santiago,” Quinn said. “I’m covering an army press conference about Fidel.”

  “Are you going into the Sierra?”

  “If I’m invited.”

  “If you see my cousin, drop my name.”

  “Who’s your cousin?”

  “Arsenio Zamora. Quesada murdered two of his boys. He is close to Fidel.”

  What Quinn said when he telephoned Hemingway was, “Max took a call from somebody asking for me and he thought he recognized your voice.”

  “Max’s ear is working,” Hemingway said. “There may be hope for him as a spy. I read your story about the killing of Cooney’s friend.”

  “Cooney just missed getting it and so did I. Pretty hairy.”

  “I’ll pick up Cooney’s doctor bills. Maybe you could work that out. But don’t connect me to it.”

  “It’ll go into the archive of lost history. Actually Cooney wants to reach you. He wrote me a letter. You know about this?”

  “No.”

  “I should give you his letter in person.”

  “Sounds like top secret.”

  “I’ll meet you if you come to Havana. Or I can bring it to you.”

  “Does this go into your novel?”

  “Chapter seven.”

  “I’m here, but right now I’ve got a funeral to go to.”

  “Who died?”

  “My dog.”

  Hemingway’s home, Finca Vigía, was twenty minutes southeast of the Floridita, a long, formidably handsome one-story white limestone Spanish Colonial built in 1882, uphill from the town of San Francisco de Paula. From an adjacent four-story white tower where Hemingway famously wrote and kept his cats, there is a distant view of the sea he made famous. Since he moved into the Finca in 1939 it had become a place where the grand and the gr
eat among writers, generals, movie stars, journalists, baseball players, sailors, drinkers, and women queued on the front steps to talk, swim, party, flirt with, or just shimmer in the waves of mythic glow that emanated from this maestro of the word, the hunt, the deep sea, the saloon, the bull-ring, the wars, the self. The crowd pilgrimaged to this American hero in the way Lázaro’s throng of beseechers crawl on their backs to him. Renata said she’d rather stay in the Buick.

  “Nonsense,” Quinn said. “He’ll be good to talk to. He’s already sorry about Cooney. There’s a whole lot more to him than you saw at the bar.”

  “I dislike him.”

  “You said that. Try again.”

  “I have no reason to try.”

  “How about his link to Santeria? He gave his Nobel medal to the Virgen del Cobre—in Santiago.”

  “He gave the medal to la Virgen? Why?”

  “He didn’t trust Batista and his thieves, so he gave it to the Cuban people through their patron saint.”

  A great and ancient ceiba tree spreading itself magnificently at the front entrance welcomed Quinn and Renata to the Finca, and a middle-aged Cuban woman opened the door and said el señor was on the porch. She walked them toward Hemingway, who was sitting in a wooden Adirondack chair, wearing a long sport shirt, shorts, sandals, and making notes on a pad. He stood up.

  “Mr. Quinn. Señorita Suárez. I’m sorry I frightened you the other night.”

  “You didn’t frighten me,” Renata said.

  “I upset you.”

  “You were cruel to Mr. Cooney.”

  “I wasn’t in my best form. I apologize.”

  “You should apologize to Mr. Cooney.”

  “Did you go to your dog’s funeral?” Quinn asked.